Animated feature “Minions” — the upcoming prequel/spin-off to the popular “Despicable Me” franchise — is taking a new approach to marketing its summer release. Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment have partnered with Amazon in a first-of-its-kind deal to brand the retailer’s delivery boxes featuring characters from the film. The bright yellow boxes “help promote the movie not only by raising awareness about the brand itself, but by noting the date the movie arrives in theaters (July 10),” TechCrunch reports. “The boxes point also to a special Amazon URL. As it turns out, that website, amazon.com/minions, is a dedicated shopping site for all things ‘minions.’”

Amazon Allowance enables parents to establish a weekly or monthly payment schedule to credit their children’s Amazon accounts with a cash balance, similar to offering them gift cards. The service — which works for anyone, not just family members — provides recipients with a means of shopping without a credit or debit card. It is also targeting the next generation of young online shoppers. Retailers such as JC Penney, Target and Walmart have made e-gifting (electronic gift cards) part of their new strategies, according to Bloomberg. CEB projects that e-gifting will reach $14 billion in 2017, more than double last year’s figure.

PwC recently released its annual five-year forecast for entertainment and media, dropping the growth rate for ad spending on TV. Last year’s report projected a 5.5 percent annual increase in ad spending over the next five years. PwC has revised that figure to 4 percent through 2019, as original programming from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon continues to compete with traditional television content. In the U.S., the number is even lower; ad spending on TV has been growing 3 percent annually on average. Continue reading Streaming Services Luring Viewers from Ad-Based Television

From desktops, laptops and tablets to game consoles and other CE devices, the Universal Serial Bus has been the industry standard for cable and connection interfaces for about 20 years. It has been speculated that USB-C, developed by the USB Implementers Forum, would soon become the successor to the USB standard. Intel announced during Computex in Taiwan last week that Thunderbolt 3 will embrace USB-C functionality, and initially offer data transfer rates twice as fast as Thunderbolt 2 and four times that of USB 3.1. Teaming the two could be a game-changer. Continue reading Thunderbolt Adopts USB-C, Universal Port of the Near Future

Apple charges app publishers 30 percent of subscription amounts initiated through apps, the same percentage it collects for in-app revenue. Some companies have been working around the charge by not enabling subscriptions through their mobile iOS app or charging consumers more. However, the company is reportedly considering a change to the agreement, but only for subscriptions that are delivered via Apple devices rather than the App Store. Such a revision suggests that only services offered through Apple TV would likely be exempt from the 30 percent fee. Continue reading Apple Considering Change to iTunes Charge for App Partners

Apple introduced a new computer language last year called Swift, and while the announcement largely flew under the radar, a number of programmers attending this week’s WWDC have spent the last year writing apps that use Swift. “Red Monk, a firm that has been doing regular rankings of programming languages for the last five years, describes the language’s growth as ‘essentially unprecedented,’” notes Bloomberg. “Just seven months after its inception, Swift had become the 22nd most popular language out of the hundreds of major languages that exist.” Developers consistently give Swift high marks for safety, modernity and expressiveness.

Three years after Apple’s launch of its own iOS Maps app, sensor-equipped vans have been appearing in cities such as Dallas, New York and Los Angeles. “While Apple was known to be gearing up for the launch of a mass transit directions service this fall in a handful of cities, sources have revealed that it is also developing its first entirely in-house mapping database to reduce its reliance on TomTom, using a fleet of mysterious vans to take still photos of business storefronts to replace Yelp photos, and building a 3D Street View feature,” notes 9to5Mac. The vans are collecting information that will be added to the core data Apple has put together for its base map. A shift to the new database is expected by 2017 or 2018.

Streaming music site SoundCloud has been growing in popularity, due in part to its social media integration, and now claims 175 million monthly users. However, the service has been at odds with the music industry since it has not been paying royalties. SoundCloud recently reached an agreement with Warner Music and last week “announced that it had struck a deal covering some 20,000 independent record labels through Merlin, an organization that represents small companies in digital negotiations,” reports The New York Times. “The Merlin deal follows another SoundCloud arrangement announced last month with the National Music Publishers’ Association, which also covers a range of smaller companies.”

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, currently serving as director of engineering at Google, predicts that humans will become artificially intelligent hybrids by the 2030s. Kurzweil believes that our brains will connect directly to the cloud using nanobots, tiny robots constructed from DNA strands. The thousands of computers in the cloud will then augment our intelligence. “Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking,” he said. According to CNN: “The bigger and more complex the cloud, the more advanced our thinking. By the time we get to the late 2030s or the early 2040s, Kurzweil believes our thinking will be predominately non-biological.”

There are currently 2.6 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide, and while developing markets have been leveling off, less mature markets are starting to experience significant growth. According to the latest annual Mobility Report from Ericsson, we should expect to see 6.1 billion smartphones in circulation by 2020, at which point phones will exceed the number of active fixed line subscriptions globally. Ericsson projects that the total number of mobile subscriptions will reach 9.2 billion in five years, as less developed markets continue their expansion. Continue reading Ericsson: 70 Percent of World Will Have Smartphones by 2020

Against the wishes of some of top congressional Democrats, the FCC approved a proposal this week that could provide large cable providers with the ability to raise their prices. The agency voted 3-2 “to limit the power of state and local regulators over cable TV packages and prices,” reports National Journal, and “declared that it will assume that there is ‘effective competition’ for cable services nationwide.” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler sided with the commission’s two Republicans and the cable industry. Democrats argued that limiting regulations could lead to consumers paying higher prices for access to news, sports and other programming.

In shipping news, retailers and tech companies continue to compete for consumers’ attention by offering fast and affordable delivery options. While Amazon, Google and others continue their plans for drone delivery — and companies continue to experiment with one- and two-hour delivery in major cities — recent news has surfaced that Apple is teaming with Postmates to offer same-day delivery of Apple Store items, Walmart is developing a new three-day shipping service, and Amazon is introducing free shipping on thousands of smaller goods. Continue reading Free Shipping and Speedy Delivery a New Focus for Companies

IDC announced this week that wearable devices have experienced eight consecutive quarters of solid growth. According to the new report released Wednesday, 11.4 million wearables shipped worldwide during the first quarter, up from 3.8 million shipped during Q1 last year. IDC credits lower prices and a greater variety of wearables, such as smartwatches and activity trackers, for the increase in global sales. Fitbit led the charge last quarter by shipping nearly 4 million devices, followed by Xiaomi, Garmin, Samsung and Jawbone. Continue reading Researcher Announces Impressive First Quarter for Wearables

Microsoft and Toshiba are joining forces to develop products and services that address the Internet of Things. “This mirrors the combination of IBM’s cloud service with ARM-based IoT development platforms,” reports Electronics Weekly. “The plan is to bring together Microsoft’s Azure IoT Cloud infrastructure with IoT applications running Toshiba’s sensors and wireless comms devices,” including Toshiba’s ApP Lite processor, driving recorders and cloud storage services. “IoT is bringing in a dramatic technology transition that is reshaping the nature of networks, the meaning of service, and the way we live and work,” said Shigeyoshi Shimotsuji, VP at Toshiba.

Magic Leap unveiled a development platform this week at MIT’s EmTech Digital conference as part of the company’s effort to encourage filmmakers, game developers and others to create augmented reality experiences on its platform. The SDK, to be released soon, works with the Unreal and Unity game engines. The company also announced that it spent part of its $592 million in recent funding to build a 300,000 square foot Florida facility for manufacturing its photonic lightfield chip. “This chip powers its augmented reality headset that works by shooting light directly onto your eye, rather than sticking a screen in front of it,” explains TechCrunch.